At the Barack Obama Secondary School in Nyang’oma Kogelo, in the highlands of western Kenya, teacher Maurice Okech Othiambo remembered the excitement that swept the village when Obama was elected president. Obama had visited his ancestral home in Kenya in 2006 as a U.S. senator, and received a rapturous welcome. In July 2009, locals watched enthusiastically as he laid out his grand vision for a reinvigorated relationship between the United States and Africa. Standing before parliament in Accra, Ghana, on one of his first trips abroad as president, Obama proclaimed “a new moment of promise,” and declared the continent to be “a fundamental part of our interconnected world.”

But in the years since, the feeling in much of Africa has been one of disconnection—both from the Obama administration and the rest of the world. Nyang’oma Kogelo hasn’t seen much in the way of material improvements—aside from a few miles of paved road leading to Obama’s step-grandmother’s house and some revenue from occasional busloads of tourists. Obama didn’t even visit Kenya during his weeklong Africa trip last year. (The country’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, is under indictment by the International Criminal Court at The Hague for his alleged role inciting tribal killings in Kenya’s contested 2007 election.) “We realize that he is an American president, not an African president,” Othiambo told me. “But we expected more. Our expectations have pretty much died out.”

Obama’s 2009 speech also resonated across the continent in Bamako, the capital of the impoverished nation of Mali, where Adam Thiam, a journalist and former Harvard fellow, believed that Obama’s African heritage would inspire him to engage deeply with the continent. “When he spoke out about corruption, about African strongmen who wanted to stay in power unconstitutionally, we were very encouraged,” said Thiam.

Today Thiam is less enthusiastic than he was five years ago. On every issue that Obama addressed—from security to health to corruption—he, like his Kenyan counterpart, believes that the president has fallen short of expectations. U.S. spending for HIV-AIDS programs in Africa has been cut. Terror groups such as Boko Haram and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have operated with impunity. China has outpaced the United States in direct investment in African economies—which grew at a robust four percent last year—with no apparent regard for strengthening democracy or human rights. And corruption in Africa has become more entrenched since Obama took office, he says. Last year 15 out of the 30 lowest-ranking countries on Transparency International’s “Corruption Perceptions Index” were African, compared to 12 out of the bottom 30 in 2009. “He has had very little impact on governance in Africa, which remains a highly corrupt continent,” Thiam says, sitting in the office of the website the independent journalist now runs in a dusty Bamako neighborhood. “I would say that Obama represents a lost opportunity.”

As Obama prepares to host 50 heads of state at the White House this week at the first “U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit,” many Africans and even members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment offer a similar assessment. Africa’s governance problems can’t be laid at Obama’s feet, of course. And Obama has had a full plate of domestic imperatives and international crises to contend with, from the war in Afghanistan to the tumultuous events surrounding the Arab Spring to the crisis in eastern Ukraine. Yet even taking more urgent concerns into consideration, Obama’s engagement with the continent has been slight. That was particularly noticeable during his first term, when he made only a single trip—24 hours in Ghana—met relatively few African leaders at the White House and offered few bold policy strokes. “The first four years this administration did not seem to have much interest at all [in Africa],” says Jendayi Frazer, the former assistant secretary of state for African affairs under George W. Bush and now a scholar at Carnegie Mellon.

Some African leaders say that it was a mistake for Africans to expect that Obama would prioritize their concerns simply because his father was born in Kenya. “A lot of Africans wanted him to visit more, be seen more, use his moral pulpit more. But he’s had to put his focus on domestic health care and other issues, and Africa was moved off the agenda,” says Maina Kiai, a Kenyan lawyer and human-rights activist who is now the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of freedom of peaceful assembly and association. Indeed Kiai suspects that Obama’s Kenyan origins may have obliged him to distance himself from Africa—to counter “all those conspiracy theories about his birth, all those people trying to make him more African than American.”

Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek bureau chief and correspondent-at-large in Africa and the Middle East. His new book, Taking Timbuktu, will be published next year.